Mai Tais with a rum designed specifically for Mai Tais
Tasting Notes
Rory: Denizen 8 rum taste: surprising! It doesn’t taste like any of the rums we’ve had in the last few months—my initial reaction was it tastes like wood, and ryan suggested bourbon. This sorta explains why I’ve seen so many people make a “rye tai”.
Mai Tai: Lots of orange. I know, intellectually, there’s lime in here; there’s one floating on top. Doesn’t matter—the aroma from the curacao is overpowering the lime scent, so I’m reading the whole citrus portion as coming from a dried orange. All zest, very little juice. There’s some pepperiness, too, that isn’t helping me distinguish the rum from rye.
It feels restrained for a tiki drink; it’s defined very much by what’s left out, and what’s present is used carefully, though there’s still plenty going on—rum, lime, orange, almond, sugar, vanilla, salt.
After a few minutes, it’s coming together a little more in the glass; a little smoother, maybe? I know we made mai tais a few weeks ago, but though we used the same recipe, this is a different drink. I’m exagerrating, but I’m in shock—I wasn’t expecting this at all.
Ryan: We did two things differently for this particular mai tai. First, we made the SC mai tai syrup to spec (with salt and vanilla) and we used Denizen Merchant 8 year reserve rum, which is pretty much intended to mimic the rum used in the original mai tai.
We took a taste of the rum beforehand. Lots of similarity with rye! warm and spicy, some woodsy notes, not a lot of sweetness or funk. A bit of sweetness at the end.
The drink itself also shows off these warm and spicy notes, which work well with the orange and the molasses/dark sugar notes from the demerara syrup. The first sips are pretty dry, very orange forward. After a few minutes, a lot more demerara shows up, and a few different notes from the rum. Different components from the rum are showing up at different points as different flavors are accentuated. There’s a lot of different flavors in the rum, so there’s a lot of different ways for it to show up, and each sip is a little bit different, I think.
Recipe
- 2 oz Denizen Merchant Reserver 8 Year Rum
- 1⁄2 oz Pierre Ferrand Dry Curacao
- 1⁄2 oz Small Hands orgeat
- 1⁄4 oz Smuggler’s Cove Mai Tai syrup (see note)
- 3⁄4 oz lime juice
Shake with crushed ice and open pour into a double rocks glass. Garnish with used spent lime shell and mint sprig.
Smuggler’s Cove Mai Tai syrup:
- 2 cups demerara sugar
- 1 cup water
- 1⁄4 tsp vanilla extract
- 1⁄8 tsp salt Bring water to just below a boil, reduce to a simmer, add sugar and whisk until totally disolved. Remove from hea and add vanilla and salt.
Source: Smuggler’s Cove